For Your Library

Formative Assessments for Preview

Examples

Examining images tied to the content to be studied is always a great preview. Asking questions that start simple and build to complex is also a way to see what kind of knowledge students bring to the table.

Getting them into the text and want to check their understanding of key content vocabulary is a challenge in any discipline (science, social studies, etc.) - So create a word cloud from all the vocabulary that is to be studied. Use it as an image and ask questions about what they recognize and don't.

Newton's First Law of Motion

Other ideas include:

Having students respond to analogies

Creating an entrance slip where students give initial response to essential question.

Comparing personal experience with key concepts

Using TCI Reading Challenges as a pretest, recording the score, and using it to compare growth later.

Notes should do more than just be a place to hang content. The student should be challenged to do something with the content that demonstrates both learning AND understanding.

Example of Sensory Figure

Lesson activities and investigations can/should be used as a formative assessment.

HA! The US through Industrialism, Lesson 7: Students participate in a game of Capture the Flag. They compare their experience to the determining factors of the war for independence from Great Britain—examining the strengths and weaknesses of each side, important battles, and other key factors in the conflict—to determine how the British were defeated.

Bring Science Alive! 3rd Grade, Unit 4, Lesson 4: Students play a game to simulate birds hunting moths. They gather data during the game. They use the data to construct an explanation for why some moths have a better chance of surviving than others.

A variation of the exit slip for 1:1 schools is to post a question on an LMS platform like Google Classroom, Edmodo for students to respond to.

If students have access to mobile devices, you could even have them text their response and call it a "Text it Slip."

Teaching strategies can be varied to build in formative assessment with rich classroom discussions. Here is a video describing one such strategy: